In the lead up to this year’s sign ups, we thought it’d be worth doing a longer form post on some more of the changes we’ve made this year.

Include a CanTeen Christmas card with your gift

When we go live and you’re all set with what you’re buying for your Santa, you will have the option to include a lovely Canteen Christmas card with your gift. All you need to do is go here, add your personal message (which will be hand-written into the card by the CanTeen Elves) and pop in your Twitter handle and your giftee’s Twitter handle into the box in the checkout form. We’ll handle the rest. Easy as.

All profits from this go directly to CanTeen and will help fund the amazing work CanTeen does with kids living with cancer, all over New Zealand.

Super Secret Santas!

As in previous years, we’re putting the call out for people to put their hands up to be a Super Secret Santa.

What’s a Super Secret Santa?

Super Secret Santas are people who volunteer to be on call to buy extra gifts if we don’t have enough to go around. When people are Bad Santas, it throws our numbers out of whack. What should be 1 + 1, is now 1 + 0 and we need it to be 1 + 1 for the game to work. This is also why we have the Bad Santa Gift Stash (shout out to our amazing sponsors once more!), but some years the Bad Santas outnumber the gifts in the Bad Santa Gift Stash. We’re hoping that’s not the case this year, but just in case, if you’d like to be a Super Secret Santa, you can sign up to do so at registration.

This is not an obligation for everyone playing; this is just for those who want to go above and beyond for the game this year. We will need to call on you fairly last minute because we won’t know numbers until everything is in the storehouse, but you will be forever loved by the Elves and we might send you something special as a thank you.

Twitter block lists

Though in NZ Secret Santa HQ we like to think that everyone gets along all the time and NZ Twitter is all spring lambs and sharing Pineapple Lumps, we’re aware this isn’t always the case and people who play may have blocked other people who also play. So to save you the awkwardness of getting someone you’ve blocked, and to save us the time of trying to rematch you (it throws our system off a bit), we’ve now integrated Twitter block lists into the game.

The process is semi-automated. When you gain access to the NZ Secret Santa dashboard, there’ll be a link that allows you to import your block list with the game. Click the link and voila!

If you have people you specifically don’t want to be a Santa for, but also don’t want to block (e.g. family, pets, colleagues, second Twitter accounts) that’s fine – just drop us an email (nzsecretsanta@nzpost.co.nz) and we’ll add those to the system manually.

Gifts for CanTeeners

Are you feeling like a charitable Santa this year? Then we want you! Our partner charity CanTeen will be receiving all the gifts intended for Bad Santas (after being vetted for appropriateness by the Elves), but we’re hoping to get some extra presents for the CanTeeners too.

Here’s the wishlist CanTeen has given us:

Colouring in books and pencils

DVDs

Food (chocolates/bags of lollies)

Nail polish

Body products (moisturiser/soap/hand creams)

Bed Socks/socks

Magazines

Small motivational wall Art pieces

Magnet holders for photos etc

Candles

Itunes gift card

Headwear (Caps, Hats, Beanies)

T-Shirts

Hair products

Wallets / Card holders

Cool stationery (e.g. fluffy pens)

Eye brow pencils

Photo frames

DIY art kits

Key rings

Posters (gaming, boy bands)

Playing cards

Mobile phone top up vouchers

Headphones

Diaries or Journals

If sending a gift for CanTeen as well, please label it clearly (To @CanTeenNZ, from @[yourTwitterhandle]) so that the Elves know which present is for your Santa and which is for charity.

That’s all from the Elves for now, but we’ll be touching base again pretty soon.